Wayãpi - Settlements

Wayãpi oral tradition contains references to a distant past of large villages with important headmen. By the nineteenth century, however, travelers were reporting small, dispersed, mobile villages of some extended families with prominent family headmen, who managed to gather kin groups under their authority both by attracting sons-in-law and by keeping their own sons at home, despite the rule of exogamy. This political feature persists today, but the mobility of the communities has been severely curtailed by patterns of Western settlements. This is espacially true in French Guiana, where communities are being stabilized by the introduction of schools, field hospitals, solar-energy installations or electric-generating plants, and, in one case, even a town hall. Although traditional dwellings ( oka ) with raised floors and thatched roofs of Geonoma palms are still constructed, more modern houses, still with raised floors but with planked walls and corrugated iron roofs, are common now.